I'm starting my own painting contract business. How do I do quick bids using blueprints?

Question

I have many years of experience in painting residential and commercial projects. Have my own tools...etc. But, am now getting into doing bids for large projects using just the blueprints to look at and figure bids.

This is new to me.

Are there any books, websites, how-to links that would cover this area? I need to make the contacts with new potential customers, do quick bids, put them into Quick Books to show them the break downs of the bid and I want to make sure that I'm doing this correctly.

Any ideas? Thank you!

Answer 1

There is more than one way of estimating.  

Being a bookkeeper the way I would go about it is to come up with a price per lineal foot for taping, a price per lineal foot for edging, a price for doing a window frame, a price per square foot for painting and so on.   Then I would take the room measurements off of the blueprints, count the doors and windows, do some simple arithmetic and come up with my bid.

Hope this helps

Jerry-the-bookkeeper